Introduction
Chapter 1 Youth 1703–1723
Chapter 2 Travel Broadens the Mind
Chapter 3 Paris and Rome 1725–30
Chapter 4 Hero of the Battlefield
Chapter 5 The Professional Writer 1735–1740
Chapter 6 The Court of the Best of all Possible Kings
Chapter 7 Mid-Life Crisis
Chapter 8 1748–56 Battle of the Philosophers
Chapter 9 The Seven Years War
Chapter 10 The Final Decade
Appendix
Bibliography
Index
About the Author
Julia Gasper has taught for the Stanford University Programme in Oxford, the University of Roehampton, Surrey and St. Bonaventure University, New York.
The Marquis d’Argens: A Philosophical Life is an enthusiastically
argued and much-needed contribution to eighteenth-century studies.
With this biography, Gasper in effect creates a fresh beginning for
scholarship on d’Argens’s thought and work. Beyond this important
consideration, and because d’Argens’ talents, interests, and
experiences ranged broadly, the book casts light on several aspects
of Enlightenment intellectualism and culture, including the
European idea of the East, art criticism, the reception of
philosophers from Descartes to the Pre-Socratics, and the world of
theatre and opera. D’Argens’s story also offers insight into
figures such as Voltaire, the Berlin Academicians, and Frederick
II, a practical joker, a scholar, and, in the bleakest moments of
the Seven Years War, a man very close to committing suicide. And
although he died before the moment of the American and French
Revolutions, d’Argens may indeed, as Gasper claims, be 'a missing
link between the Enlightenment and the Romantic generation' in part
because 'while others talked of revolution, he practiced it'. For
these reasons, and more, Gasper’s book belongs in the hands of
readers interested in Continental philosophy and literature of the
Long Eighteenth Century.
*The Eighteenth-Century Intelligencer*
Gasper’s book is a quite solidly crafted and very readable
monograph about an author whose life and work indeed deserve
greater attention.
*French History*
This is by far the best study available on a major but unjustly
neglected Enlightenment writer who ought to be as famous for his
intellectual contribution as he once was for his wit and amusing
storytelling. This book fills a considerable gap in the standard
literature on the Enlightenment.
*Jonathan Israel, Institute for Advanced Study*
An accessible and interesting account of a man who, as Julia Gasper
says, situated himself ‘at the nerve-centre of the
Enlightenment.
*Joanna Innes, University of Oxford*
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